Overview of Container Builder

Google Cloud Container Builder is a service that executes your builds on Google Cloud
Platform's infrastructure.

Container Builder can import source code from a variety of repositories or
cloud storage spaces, execute a build to your specifications, and produce
artifacts such as Docker containers or Java archives.

Build configuration and build steps

You can write a build config to provide
instructions to Container Builder on what tasks to perform. You can
configure builds to fetch dependencies, run unit tests, static analyses, and
integration tests, and create artifacts with build tools such as docker, gradle,
maven, bazel, and gulp.

Container Builder executes your build as a series of build steps, where each
build step is run in a Docker container. Executing build steps is analogous to
executing commands in a script.

You can either use the build steps provided by Container Builder and the
Container Builder community, or write your own custom build steps:

You can integrate build triggers with many code repositories, including Cloud
Source Repository, GitHub, and Bitbucket.

Viewing build results

You can view your build results using the gcloud tool, the
Container Builder
API or use
the Container Registry's build history menu in GCP Console, which
displays details and logs for every build Container Builder executes. For
instructions see Viewing Build
Results.

How builds work

The following steps describe, in general, the lifecycle of a
Container Builder build:

Prepare your application code and any needed assets.

Create a build config file in YAML or JSON format, which contains
instructions for Container Builder.

Submit the build to Container Builder.

Container Builder executes your build based on the build config you
provided.

If applicable, any built images are pushed to Container Registry.

Container Builder interfaces

You can use Container Builder with the Google Cloud Platform Console, gcloud
command-line tool, or Container Builder's REST API.

As with other Cloud Platform APIs, you must authorize
access using OAuth2. After you have authorized access,
you can then use the API to start new builds, view build status and details,
list builds per project, and cancel builds that are currently in process.

Running builds locally

If you want to test your build before submitting it to Container Builder,
you can run your build locally using the container-builder-local tool. For
instructions on using this tool see the Building and Debugging
Locally page.

What's next

Read the Docker quickstart to
learn how to use Container Builder to build Docker images.